A perennial question for marketers is, how much should we be spending?
Community banks have never had the budgetary freedom to spend with reckless abandon, as many fintechs and neobanks did before the capital spigot stopped flowing so freely.
So bank marketers tend to look for benchmarks for their budgets — to see if they are investing less in growth than their peers and to figure out how much they should request at budget-setting time.
This analysis of bank marketing spending — which focuses on banks with assets of $2 billion to $10 billion as of yearend 2022 — aims to help.
It draws on data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., with one of the key data points being the “advertising and marketing expenses” item required in call reports. A bank is required to submit this information when its advertising and marketing expenses total $100,000 or more and when these expenses exceed 7% of its total “other noninterest expenses.”
That line item doesn’t include every expense incurred by a bank’s marketing function. Salaries, for example, appear elsewhere. Other departments also might end up covering expenses for marketing technology, consulting and more, as the approach varies from one bank to the next.
Nonetheless, this data offers insight into marketing spending across all institutions and provides a basis for assessing trends.
The Financial Brand partnered with Capital Performance Group on this project. See the data and read the rest of the article here.
